I’m sitting down to write this in the afternoon of my 59th birthday, next to an open bag of potato chips and a glass of iced tea. My usual writing implements.
My day started with a 7am email from a seldom-heard-from but old friend and colleague from the newspaper. “You made the big time” he said, letting me know that Merriam-Webster used my column as an example for today’s Word of the Day: “cohesive”. He has subscribed to their daily email for years and was passing the news along.
Such unexpected fun news would be exiting any day. But because it happened on my birthday, it must mean something more, right?
Look I understand I didn’t win an excellence award and that this was not a competition. I don’t consider it an achievement per say, and I’m not claiming bragging rights. It was chance -an internet lottery. I imagine my column was randomly picked by a search bot on the world-wide-web looking for a sentence with “cohesive” in it. Yet I still want to find some larger meaning in it.
What message could the gods of chance be sending?
First some background on why I’m in a contemplative mood.
Even before the Covid days came upon us, I was winding down my HR consulting practice and had been pondering what to do about this column. It’s 12 years old, maybe it’s run its course? I’ve been writing about HR in the workplace because it’s been my passion, but now that passion is shifting toward the “retirement” phase of work life.
Maybe it’s my age, maybe it’s that Covid has accelerated my friend’s and colleague’s plans to retire. Maybe it’s been the untimely passing of two dear friends. Maybe it’s that the plague has made life, health and time itself seem even more precious now. But I have to be honest, life-“after”-work seems much more interesting to me now than life-“at”-work.
So all these things have been knocking around in my head for a while, and suddenly on my birthday –usually a day of introspection for me– boom! A happy fluke, and I won an internet lottery that calls attention to my baby, this column.
Well, the boom has jolted me out of my avoidance of the inevitable change that I must make.
What will that look like? I don’t know. It might mean I write about transitioning into retirement over the next few months and see what comes. Or it might mean I hand off the column to another writer. Or maybe the column simply rides off into the sunset.
Or maybe I start that book I always wanted to write: What they don’t tell you about retirement –It’s not just about having a good 401k….
Stay tuned.
©Copyright Eva Del Rio. Send questions to Eva@evadelrio.com
